Hồ Chí Minh
Where the order begins.
Visits, introductions, inspection: the work happens on the workshop floor, in person. We keep a short book of workshops on purpose — the same names, season after season.
The company and its people.
Trancent is a French-Vietnamese sourcing agency on one route, Vietnam to France, with teams in Lille and in Hồ Chí Minh City.
The company works with a limited number of manufacturers, each seen on site before any introduction.
Why us
In between
What we carry across.
Two calendars govern every order: Tết, when the whole country stops and goes home, and the French shelf season. We learn each side until we can answer for it, so nobody has to become an expert in the other’s country. We already are.
Lille
Where the order lands.
The buyers are here, and here we answer for every contract. French mass retail and buying groups buy on a shelf calendar planned a year ahead, and it is the same houses that come back each season — that is what we bring a workshop.
A workshop that already knows a buyer’s tolerances is worth more than a new quote.
That is why the book stays short on both sides — the same workshops, the same houses, season after season — and why the same team stays on the file, from the first factory visit to the day the container sails.
Core team
Timothy TranCEO
Relations, operations and development in Vietnam
Théo TranCCO
Business development and relations
Scott Debaere
Meetings, events and planning
Hoàng Nguyên Lê
Vietnamese relations
Advisory board
France
Lille · Paris · Bordeaux
Le Havre · Marseille
Commercial side: French mass retail, buying groups and hospitality.
Việt Nam
Hồ Chí Minh · Nha Trang
Hà Nội · Quy Nhơn
Vietnam side: the relationship with the factories, in their language.
Company in registration · Lille, France · Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam
01A letter from the CEO
Vietnam is in my blood.
Vietnam carries my best memories. People who feed you before they know your name. Streets already wide awake at six in the morning. Tết, when the whole country stops and goes home. It’s in my blood, and it has never left my mind.
I’m French-Vietnamese. France taught me how to work. Vietnam taught me what the work is for. And the closer I looked at its workshops, the clearer it got: Vietnamese hands already make the furniture Europe wants. Most of it still ships to the United States. Not because Europe doesn’t buy. Because the road to Europe is paperwork and trust, and nobody was standing at both ends of it.
So we stand there. Both ends. For good.
Trancent starts in Lille, because that’s where the buyers are and where I answer for every contract. But its heart is in Vietnam. I see a country the world will choose for its name, not its price. I want to build there, with Vietnamese people, so more of what the work is worth stays where the work is done.
If an order goes wrong, you’ll know whose name is on it. Mine. Furniture is where we start. The products will change. The love won’t. It will always be Vietnam.
Timothy TranCEO Lille and Hồ Chí Minh
02Market insight
Five facts that shape a programme in Vietnam.
Drawn from Trancent’s work on site, and what a buyer should plan for.
The catalogue is rarely the factory
Most collections shown to a foreign buyer belong to a trading house; the factory that actually cuts the wood sits one or two subcontractors further down. Trancent visits the site where the goods are made, and names the building.
Moisture decides the complaint
Timber for the Vietnamese market sits comfortably at twelve to fourteen percent. A heated apartment in Paris in February wants eight to ten. Most panels that split in Europe left Vietnam technically correct.
A certificate is not a chain
An FSC certificate at company level says nothing about your lot. What counts is the claim written on the invoice and the lot standing behind it — which is precisely what the European rules ask to see.
Tết is a fact of the calendar
Capacity empties for weeks around the lunar new year, and quality slips in the rush before it. A programme built around Tết lands on time; one built against it arrives late and sanded thin.
The best manufacturers are not looking for you
They are booked a season ahead and do not answer cold email. They answer a name they already know. That access is what Trancent provides.
None of this is confidential. It is rarely written down.
03Network
Access, and discretion.
Trancent works with French mass retailers and buying groups, alongside the hospitality sector.
Client names are not published. Every introduction rests on a site visit and a documented file.
Every order is recorded from the first shipment onward: dates, volumes, defects and settlements.
Scope: Vietnam and France, exclusively.